With her face looming down from billboards, splashed across the pages of every magazine you flick through and featured in every style hotlist the world over, it’s easy to assume that we know Kate Moss – but the supermodel who rarely agrees to interviews, and whose voice has only been captured on film a handful of times is in fact hugely elusive.
In her most revealing interview to date, the Brit model has opened up to Vanity Fair magazine, divulging details of the pressures of modelling, a nervous breakdown and years of heartache.
Having been scouted at the tender age of 14, Moss an innocent freckle-faced teen, shot to fame following a shoot with the late Corinne Day for The Face, which despite the resulting images, she found painful. Moss says, “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, ‘If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again’. So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it.”
Despite becoming an internationally renowned model and star. After appearing in those Calvin Klein campaign shots alongside Mark Wahlberg, Moss explains, “I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts. It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and Francesca Sorrenti [Moss’s friend and mother of Mario Sorrenti], thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that’.
“It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird – a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work and I had to do it.”
Talking of her relationship with Hollywood actor Johnny Depp, Moss explains that it was the only time she really felt secure. But after four years together, they split in 1998 and Moss was left heartbroken. The model told Vanity Fair,
“There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said. Like if I said, ‘What do I do?’ – he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust.
“Nightmare. Years and years of crying. Oh, the tears…”
Despite becoming hugely successful during the era of ‘heroin chic’ in the 90s, it was a tag that the model never felt entirely comfortable with, nor has ever really managed to move beyond. Speaking of her androgynous and waif-like figure she simply put it down to a lack of food . “At that time I was staying at a B&B in Milan, and you’d get home from work and there was no food. You’d get to work in the morning, there was no food. Nobody took you out for lunch when I started. Carla Bruni took me out for lunch once. She was really nice. Otherwise, you don’t get fed.”
Talking of her party girl reputation, Moss said “I don’t really go to clubs any more. I’m actually quite settled. Living in Highgate with my dog and my husband and daughter. I’m not a hell-raiser.”
The interview comes at a pivotal moment for the supermodel as the very first retrospective of her career by way of the publication Kate: The Kate Moss Book is launched. In the coffee table tome the model is quoted as saying, “I was lucky to be with Johnny… he taught me a lot about fame. He told me ‘never complain, never explain’.That’s why I don’t use Twitter and things like that. I don’t want people to know what is true all the time and that’s what keeps the mystery.”
She also goes on to discuss her style icon status, revealing how the constant attention from paparazzi has worked towards defining her oft-imitated look, “If you do a different look every day, they’re going to be waiting for the next look, and then it’s a paparazzi shot. Whereas if you just wear the same thing, then they get bored and leave you alone.”